Game 1 WCQF AfterThoughts: Playoff Games Mean Something

The experience of a playoff game is just different. From the tension before puck drop to the final push in the third period, things are fraught with the implications of disaster.

Even for crucial games that might determine a playoff berth down the stretch, it’s exceedingly rare for them to mean equally as much for both teams. Usually a fan is just concerned with why their team needs to win this game.

In the playoffs, that all changes. A series is a pitched battle in which every game is the equivalent of territory gained, a new set of trenches dug. After Game 1, seeing your team on one side or the other of “1-0” for two days means everything, because it’s all you have until Game 2. You can’t win or lose the series in one game, but that game is a prize for the taking, and only one of the teams can have it.

All that to say, there’s a tendency to put undue pressure on one game, or even one moment within a game. And that’s why, despite a back-and-forth first period in which Dallas punched back enough to keep it a one-goal game after 20 minutes, it really did feel like the game was over when Brayden McNabb flung a shot though traffic to make it 4-2 just a minute into the second period.

It was a lucky goal, absolutely. Jason Robertson made a great play to disrupt a cross-ice pass in the high slot, and the puck found its way to McNabb, who flung the puck towards the net, only for it to bore a hole through the mass of bodies and past a helpless Jake Oettinger.

Lucky goals can be overcome when they’re the first one. And really, there was no reason to think that even a 4-2 lead was any more insurmountable than a 3-2 lead. Still, we can only experience the games with the memories we have, and any fan who remembers the stifling paralysis a rolling Vegas team can force onto a game probably felt the same way. Dallas had been fighting back from the first minutes of the game; they could ill afford to make a steep hill even steeper.

Everyone can point to a given series in which Dallas (or another team) lost the first game, only to go on to win. Dallas did it against Minnesota and Seattle last year, and frankly, I preferred this sort of loss to the four-goal return of Joe Pavelski against Seattle that ended in overtime heartbreak. This game was a bummer, but it told us something without having to mean everything.

***

On the fan experience side, I’d be remiss if I didn’t take a minute to point out the bonkers game presentation opening. Dallas is leaning hard into some kind of AI theme, which meant, in no particular order: a lot of Casio digital watch font in Skyline Green; an odd, grey version of Victor E. Green lurking around the concourse without his usually goofy demeanor; lasers, lasers, everywhere; two terrifying gunshots/cannon blasts right at the end of a deafening musical sequence; and finally, a weird metaloid maniac character attempting to pump up the crowd by doing his best impression of a silent Ottawa Spartan.

That all culminated in a weird CGI sequence on the video board depicting an alien spaceship coating downtown Dallas in green laser goo before landing atop the American Airlines Center roof.

Was this spaceship related to the metaloid maniac guy? Was it just some sort of cosmic UberEats order for Victor E. Green, himself an alien from a galaxy “far, far away”? It was never explained, although it was doubled down upon by a fake newscast in the first intermission in which two actors described the sequence we had seen 30 minutes ago, simply ending with both purported news anchors wondered why the spaceship had chosen to land on this building, right now. Maybe some questions are better left unanswered.

And before I end this unhinged rant about kids these days, rock and roll music, and why technology is going to destroy my retirement account, let me just say this: playoff hockey is more than sufficient to engender wonder and excitement all on its own. The natural tension of the game action and the intensity of the players is so incredibly palpable that a lot of the external game presentation stuff can begin to get downright aggravating, at times. The swish of the skates, the click of the puck snapped onto an open stick blade, and the crash and rattle of a big hit against the boards are going to live in your memory for years; the lasers and unrelenting bass simply make it harder to relax in between anxious moments.

It does look cool, though. I guess that’s fun if you don’t much care about the game. I’m sure there are studies on how no one has any attention span anymore, and how game presentation is all about tricking people to look up from their phones, even if it takes actual cannons to do it. It’s more of a symptom of a deeper cultural issue than the problem itself, I am sure.

Anyway, I still love going to hockey games. But the weird window dressing surrounding the priceless product of playoff hockey will never cease to bemuse an irrelevant millenial like me. Some things are better when they’re allowed to speak for themselves.

***

Right, the game. You can point to special teams if you want to diagnose a cause. In a vacuum, you’re probably going to lose any game when you go 0-fer on the penalty kill and 0-fer on the power play. But the more startling thing here is how the Stars gave up power play goals. In both cases, and as Sean wrote last night, the Stars had trouble dealing with Tomáš Hertl in front of the net. You can imagine how even that sentence immediately evokes fantasies of Jani Hakanpää clearing out the crease, but the real problem here is that Dallas was giving up good shots with traffic to begin with right off the hop. The Stars’ penalty kill has been a big strength for most of the season, and it’s not because they’ve been Matvichuking and Hatchering players left and right. Rather, they’ve taken away the prime passing and shooting lanes and pounced on 50/50 pucks with shrewed aggression, in turn forcing teams to try riskier plays, which sometimes results in shorthanded chances. But none of that works if you lose faceoffs or surrender the zone before you can get your box/diamond set up.

The Stars’ power play also needs to get better, but I have full confidence they’ll get goals from that unit in the series. Each team has now shown the other their first plan for dealing with them, and now it’s about adapting and reacting. The margins tend to shrink over the course of a series, and Dallas has more than enough talent on their roster to win the next special teams battle, or at least not lose it. They only lost this game by one goal despite giving up four goals in 21 minutes, remember. Losing is bad, but this was not 2023 Vegas.

You can also point to goaltending as a problem if you want, though I’d argue Dallas is still much to be preferred in that department. Jake Oettinger didn’t look bad last night, so much as he didn’t have many occasions to look good. Sure, four goals on 15 shots is a rotten cologne to wear, but the Marchessault goal was the only one that really felt like Oettinger outright lost a battle. Bang-bang play, uncovered 42 goal-scorer off the rush…these things happen. Oettinger was not the problem last night, albeit not the solution either.

Besides, if you’re Vegas, aren’t you far more concerned about your own goaltending right now? Adin Hill hasn’t looked right in a while, and now Logan Thompson is giving up stinkers in a crucial third period to let Dallas back in a game they were beginning to give up on. One of these teams is trying to win with the equivalent of Kari Lehtonen and Antii Niemi, and that team is, at last, not Dallas.

Really though, Dallas needed to grab this game early. That Ryan Suter goal called back for offside was crushing, because that was their chance to hit RESET after an annoying fourth-line penalty and the opening Vegas power play goal. And really, isn’t offside review just the worst, always? Put it this way: without review, offside calls are largely going to balance out. You’ll have some close calls go either way, and the occasional bad call go against you, but you just have to live with it. Instead, we have a system where the close calls and the bad calls will only be reversed if they are taking goals off the board, and boy, I’ve never heard an arena boo a linesman like Dallas fans were doing last night. I wonder if the immediate offside review rattled the two linesmen, because there were two other fairly obvious missed offside calls later in the game, one of which (a Dallas rush into the zone that was wrongly whistled down) the arena crew slowed down and replayed on board. The pressure doesn’t only go up for the players in these games.

Instead of a 1-1 game, Dallas went down 2-0 shortly thereafter, and they never did manage to tie it. I don’t much care about the LTIR flap, because the GMs don’t much seem to care about it either, but I do think offside review and the silly trapezoid have vastly outstayed their welcome. Time to do the right thing and make the game play its best.

***

Again, this isn’t Vegas at their peak. The ~Golden~ Knights were giving up pucks even before Logan Stankoven ripped one off Mark Stone’s stick to feed Robertson, and Dallas had many chances to pile on through the first 20 minutes. But as the game wore on, Vegas became more comfortable and lanes started closing down, and I think that trend is likely to continue. The Stars have slain a lot of their first-period dragons this year, and even climbing back to 3-2 in a wild opening frame spoke to how much tougher this group is than last year’s. Vegas hardly generated anything in the final two periods, and while that was somewhat by design, it’s also a testament to how different the Golden Knights are this year.

Dallas can roll out three forward lines who can defend, transition, and score, whereas Vegas had to choose between attacking and defending for most of the final two periods. They’re still a dangerous team (you may have noticed), but they have more vulnerabilities to account for than they used to.

Finally, the Stars showed a lot of encouraging signs amid the disappointment. Yes, the top defense pairing had some hiccups, and Pavelski and Roope Hintz didn’t really bring enough to make the top line dangerous. Robertson’s goal, remember, came with Stankoven on the ice, and that same top line couldn’t quite find a goal (or even a great rebound) despite playing most of the final 2:30 of the game at 6-on-5.

And man, how impressive is it that the Stars’ youngest players in Stankoven and Johnston were among their best? Jamie Benn was solid as well, and his opening goal was a bit of minor redemption after his last appearance in a Vegas series, but it’s genuinely encouraging to see the Stars so well-stocked with players who don’t shrink in big moments. Mason Marchment showed up even outside of his fluky goal, and if he brings that game every night, the Stars are going to be a big problem for Vegas and anyone else.

The margins of the lineup draw a lot of conversation, but I don’t think Nils Lundkvist (who was good in minimal ice time) or Evgenii Dadonov (who should maybe swap with Pavelski for a few shifts, just to see what happens) are going to be the difference in this series, either by their absence or their presence. Dallas’s top four on defense and top nine up front are the envy of nearly every team in the league.

The only thing that can consistently hamper the Stars’ approach is self-doubt (and isn’t that true for all of us?), which tends to creep in later in the game when you’ve been trailing since the drop. And for as good of a comeback team as Dallas has been (and will need to be if they’re going to make a deep run), they aren’t going to be successful if they’re giving up three goals in the first period against any team. If they can win the next game, I really think the advantage swings massively back in Dallas’s favor, even if home-ice technically doesn’t. Remind Vegas that this isn’t going to be a repeat of last year, and suddenly all of those cracks they’re papered over all year begin to look a lot bigger.

A playoff series is a journey. This was one stop, but it’s rare that a journey is defined by its first moment, just as it’s rare than a series is defined by Game 1 rather than a Game 3 or a Game 5. Last year, Dallas lost Game 1 against Vegas by a score of 4-3 in overtime, and the next one in overtime as well. But it wasn’t until the debacle in the third game that things really slipped away in that series.

This year, even though Dallas didn’t make it to overtime, you can’t help but feel that the series is right there for the taking. Vegas is going to be a tough out. Maybe the toughest Dallas could have drawn. But everything we were saying before the game is still true afterwards. Dallas can win this series, and it was never going to be a four-game sweep. Given what we’ve seen so far, Dallas just needs to stumble a little less to win a lot more.